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Drawn & Quarterly
KEGAN MCFADDEN
Easy

it’s easy: you pour a mug of beer & then a shot of bourbon. you light a match

CHRIS CASUCCIO
Elephant

sat behind the trailers with julie eatingthe peanut butter sandwiches peter’swife made that morning by the park sink

Enchantment & Other Demons
RAWI HAGE
Empty City

Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hid

MICHELLE ELRICK
Ethelbert: Ten Days in May

Excerpt from Michelle Elrick's Then/Again.

Drunk Family Dog Trip

Leonard Cohen, a troupe of French-Canadian clowns, a person with an antiquated profession, an unusually tall municipal bureaucrat, Gordie Howe and others coalesce in these randomly generated CanLit premises.

MITIARJUK NAPPAALUK
Examinations

“Sanaaq! Qumaq’s blood is too weak and the same is true for Aanikallak’s. They’ll both have to go to hospital!” From Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, the first ever Inuit novel.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
99¢ Bin

A list of things you can get for 99¢.

JACOB WREN
A Kind of Dream Therapy

"And my theory about professional artists was as follows: Artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community."

Always Waking Up in Montreal

"I follow my penis around town for a while, wandering aimlessly through all the women—why do I ever leave this city?"

ADAM GILDERS
Another Ventriloquist

In this excerpt from Adam Gilders' Another Ventriloquist, a father builds his daughter a swan's nest, a ventriloquist revises his act, and a beaver terrorizes a neighbourhood.

Michał Kozłowski
Antonia

Was it fever or was it the heat that made Antonia perspire so heavily?

Artists & Writers Colonies: Retreats, Residencies and Respites for the Creative Mind
Bad Men Who Love Jesus

It isn’t what you think. I’m not just another American gringo,chasing old lady luck South.Staring wide-eyed at their beautiful skin,at the bones of the burros,the dogs and the rats. It’s not why I’ve come, to stare, to open my eyesthis wide, sucking the lemon before I drink.

Bannock, Beans & Black Tea
JACK MITCHELL
Battle Ready

And so the Marquis of Montcalm • now brought them to the field of warHis handsome face was glad • for in his heart • he knew the hour had come When destiny would be decided • ’neath impregnable Quebec

Sara Cassidy
Beautiful Days

Thinking back to the lovely black turtleneck years, before the crinkles and the white hairs.

Black & Blue
Missy Marston
Positivity!

"How do people shake off the embarrassment of being themselves, ignore the distastefulness of all that is human and just get along?"

SALVATORE DIFALCO
Rat Lake

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue.

ELAINE MCCLUSKEY
Rating Dr. Chestnut

"The waiting room was filled with junkies. During my visit, the doctor almost fell asleep. He sent me for some tests, but lost the results."

MICHAEL PODGURNEY
Rings

"I hate feeling sorry for people, because the world isn't perfect and I can't feel sorry for every unfortunate bastard I come across."

rews and he waited while whoever was on the other end waited
Stephen Osborne
Julia’s World

I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”

Stephen Osborne
Lions Gate

Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene t

George Fetherling
Indochine

Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a fading one-time French colonial outpost on a spot where a bend in the Mekong River makes room for a large tear-shaped island directly opposite the centre-ville, which runs only far enough back from the riverbank to allow a few commercial streets. The new bridge to Thailand is a short distance way. Thai-style wats and other temples, minor and major, are everywhere.

Daniel Collins
Letter from Nepal

At first the blackouts in Kathmandu are limited to six hours a week, so in my area we do without lights on Saturday and Sunday evenings. It’s not difficult—candles at dinner, quite charming at first—but then we jump to fifteen hours a week without power, then to thirty-six hours, all within ten days. The govern

Stephen Osborne
Intellectual in the Landscape

When the celebrated English poet Rupert Brooke came to Canada on the train from New York in 1913, he had been warned that he would find “a country without a soul.” The gloomy streets of Montreal, overshadowed by churches and banks and heavy telephone wires, reminded him of the equally gloomy streets of Glasgow and Birmingham.

Michael Hetherington
Border Crossing

It took me three tries to get into the States, and even then I had to fake the papers. They wanted to know that I was going to come back to Canada—that I wasn’t going to stay down there.

Myrna Kostash
Looking for Byzantium

In September 2001 I had spent a week in Istanbul foraging for remains of Byzantium when I learned from the young, personable and exceedingly neat hotel receptionist, Taner, that his hometown, Iznik, south of Istanbul, was known as Nicaea to the Byzan

Trevor Battye
What Day It Is

Among the people who live outside the Dominion building in downtown Vancouver, across the street from the cenotaph at Victory Square, is a woman who might be in her late forties and who occasionally turns up in a wedding dress. I’ve never seen her speak to anyone. She simply walks up and holds out her empty hand toward you.

Snail Mail

I’m sorry, but you cannot mail any box with writing on it. I see. Perhaps you have a marker with which I can cross out the writing? No, we have no markers here. Perhaps you have some packing tape we can put over the writing? No, we have no packing tape here. How about some of that special blue-and-yellow postal service tape I see there? No, no señorita, you cannot put special blue-and-yellow postal service tape just anywhere.

David Albahari
Godzilla in Kosovo

Will independence bring Godzilla back into my dreams?

Daniel Collins
Ginsberg in Duncan

Allen Ginsberg is speaking into a tape recorder hanging from the rear-view mirror of my mother’s Volvo, composing a poem with the attitude of one accustomed to the gratitude of posterity.

Stephen Osborne
Hiatus

During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? The ornithopter man was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who never stopped smiling.

Stephen Osborne
Strong Man

The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand.

Stephen Osborne
Other City, Big City

On the last day of October in Toronto a man in an art gallery said: “Showers should be coming in around 4 pm. They don’t always get it down to the hour like that.”

Stephen Osborne
Lowbrow Lit

One day in Vancouver in the late seventies, Pierre Berton and John Diefenbaker appeared at the same time in the book department at Eaton’s department store to sign copies of their new books, which had just been released by rival publishers.

Stephen Osborne
Memory of Fire

We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.

Stephen Osborne
Evictions

When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, B.C., burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground.

Stephen Osborne
A Friend Moves Away

A friend who was thinking of moving back home to Calgary picked up a newspaper in the corner grocery near her place in Vancouver and there was a photograph on the front page of a man in a cowboy hat surrounded by a herd of cattle.

Stephen Osborne
A River Gets Big

A friend in Whitehorse who was preparing to paddle down the Yukon River with seven other women in a big canoe wrote to say that she was feeling uneasy about paddling in the stern, especially, as she put it in her own words, “when the river gets big after Minto.”

Stephen Osborne
A Sporting Life

A man I haven’t thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath.

Adam Lewis Schroeder
Seasons in the Abyss

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.

Daniel Francis
Dates with Destiny

Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned tha

Janet Warner
Remembering Andy

The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.

Michael McLeod
Strays

In early March 2003, when I arrived in Taiwan to teach English, I took to the streets of Taoyuan County to take some photographs. I was looking for anything—signs, market scenes, strange faces, cityscapes, bus stations, barber shops—but all I could see was dogs. These dogs were not pets, though they may once have been. They were strays—dogs that lived on their own.

Stephen Osborne
The Sweetness of Life

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Stephen Henighan
Not Reading

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Stephen Henighan
Plague

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Alberto Manguel
In Praise of Ronald Wright

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Rhonda Waterfall
Les Joyeux Lémuriens

“Thank Christ,” says Dieter when I finally wake up. “I thought you were dead.”

roni-simunovic
Space-time Queertinuum

Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comics Anthology is an action-packed, swashbuckling collection of short comics produced by twenty six writers and artists of diverse sexualities and genders.

Stephen Osborne
Unhappy

Stephen Osborne discusses the happiness level of Vancouver, the best place on earth.

Réal Godbout
Kafka in Clayton, OK

Are you an engineer? Are you sure?

Mary Leah de Zwart
Eaten by Dog, Run Over by Train

Wally, the orange tabby: Fell out of travel trailer going over Pavillion Mountain, may be living happily at farm on top of mountain.

Alberto Manguel
The Shy Man

“I think of my public speeches as the shy man’s revenge.”

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Skip to the Obits

AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Death and the Penguin, a novel that follows the life of a young Ukrainian writer and his penguin.

Stephen Osborne
A Dream of Bearded Ladies

Stephen Osborne talks about Bearded Ladies, a documentary about the works of renowned photographer Rosamond Norbury.

Levine Flexhaug
A Sublime Vernacular

A series of of speed paintings by Levine Flexhaug.

Evel Economakis
White Night Patrol

"The seven of us sat around a small, wobbly table in the living room and stared at each other between shots of rotgut vodka."

David Albahari
Voices

My friend, who writes poems and stories, tells me in the café that he finds it more and more difficult to deal with the writer inside him.

Stephen Osborne
Sleight of Hand

Stephen Osborne plunges into the pedestrian flow and encounters panhandlers, magicians and a cyclist praying to a monument of Edward VII.

Michał Kozłowski
Pillars of Salt

"The tour guide said: every hour you spend down in the mine adds three minutes to your life." Michal Kozlowski reports from 300 feet below ground.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Knitting Class

During World War II my grandmother ran contraband, hunted pigeons.

Alberto Manguel
Fist

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

Lindsay Diehl
Honolulu

Lindsay Diehl encounters choppy waves, a beautiful man in a hot tub and a pendant shaped like a curved tongue on a trip to Hawaii.

JILL MANDRAKE
Here Lies

Jill Mandrake reviews Local Customs by Audrey Thomas, a ghost story and murder mystery set in West Africa.

Michael Hayward
To the Moomins! (And Beyond)

Michael Hayward reviews Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition by Tove Jansson, a collection of comic strips that contain "the poetry of our world: sad, joyful, dangerous, enchanting."

roni-simunovic
Out and About

Roni Simunovic reviews Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives by Nia King, a collection of interviews about gender and sexuality, and how to make art, make rent and survive.

Bruce Serafin
Leetle Bateese

"Since Drummond is spectacularly out of date, why not discuss him?" Bruce Serafin looks at William Henry Drummond's place in the history of corny yet unforgettable Canadian poetry.

Stephen Osborne
Marginal

Stephen Osborne finds a copy of Francoise Sagan's Those Without Shadows at the bus stop, complete with margin notes that create a new sort of text.

Patty Osborne
Buffalo Gal

Patty Osborne reviews The Perimeter Dog by Julie Vandervoort.

Michał Kozłowski
Bukowski Effect

Michal Kozlowski reviews Stardust, Bruce Serafin's essay collection: "punchy narrative, little exposition, unburdened by political correctness."

Stephen Osborne
Don't Look Back

Stephen Osborne reviews The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti.